PHP hidden directories - Windows

Question

I'm attempting to add a feature to our intranet, which will allow users to log onto the intranet, and access documents stored within a Windows network SAN.

At the moment, I've successfully retrieved all the file and folder names within a specified users 'My Documents'.

I'm having difficulty removing hidden files and folders from the array. At the moment, I can remove all folders and files starting with . .

However on Windows, they're being marked as 'hidden' in the properties. I've googled and found lots of resources about how to mark a file as hidden, and how to hide files that start with a . , but none on how to remove hidden windows files / folders. One post on stackoverflow mentions to use DirectoryIterator, but at the moment, but haven't explained at all how to use it to check if a files marked as hidden.

We have over 1000 users, with approximately 500MB - 1GB of documents, with multiple layers of directories, so It needs to be relatively fast.

For clarification: During a recursive iteration on a Windows system, how can I find out whether a directory is hidden or not, without relying on a prepended . symbol?

Answer 1

Ok, so worked it out, with help from the exec() function, so use with care! I'm using CodeIgniter, so I've modified the directory_helper.php function slightly, as its installed on a windows box, it'll always need to check for the hidden files, but it should also work for non-codeigniter sites:

function directory_map($source_dir, $directory_depth = 0, $hidden = FALSE)
{
    if ($fp = @opendir($source_dir))
    {
        if(!$hidden)
        {
            $exclude = array();
            exec('dir "' . $source_dir . '" /ah /B', $exclude);
        }

        $filedata   = array();
        $new_depth  = $directory_depth - 1;
        $source_dir = rtrim($source_dir, DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR).DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR;

        while (FALSE !== ($file = readdir($fp)))
        {
            // Remove '.', '..', and hidden files [optional]
            if ( ! trim($file, '.') OR ($hidden == FALSE && $file[0] == '.') OR ($hidden === FALSE && in_array($file, $exclude)))
            {
                continue;
            }

            if (($directory_depth < 1 OR $new_depth > 0) && @is_dir($source_dir.$file))
            {
                $filedata[$file] = directory_map($source_dir.$file.DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR, $new_depth, $hidden);
            }
            else
            {
                $filedata[] = $file;
            }
        }

        closedir($fp);
        return $filedata;
    }

    return FALSE;
}

This scanned 2207 files, and 446 folders in approx 11 seconds (Ages I know, but the best I could do). Tested it on 500 folders and 200 files, and did it in around 3 seconds.

Its a recursive function which will scan each non-hidden directory. The first thing it does is scan the current directory for all hidden files and folders using the exec('dir *directory* /ah /B') function.

It will then store the results in an array and make sure that the current file/directory being read isn't in that array.